Hannah and Papa J

Thursday, March 19, 2015

Tyler Durden

Dear Hannah,

Right after Fight Club came out on DVD, my friends and I used to get high on all kinds of things and throw punches on the streets of Italy. We had rules, because we were too sensible to get hurt too badly: no punches to the face, and nothing below the belt. If someone wanted out, we let him. I don't remember anyone fighting any girls, which would have been embarrassing for both parties whether the man won or lost. But the point of the matter was that however ridiculous Fight Club looks now, it had an impact on nearly every young man who saw it. I saw it with nerds who ranted and raved about it in between matches of Starcraft. I pretended it with punks and stoners who acted it under the influence of ecstasy and cocaine. Nobody who admired the film, from the jocks to the preps to the band kids, was anything remotely like Tyler Durden. Everyone, on some level, wanted to be like him.

There was really only one thing that caught every young man's attention in Fight Club, and it was what we'd been missing as "suburban" Americans all along. When you live in comfort it's hard to prove you're a man. If you're under 18 it's even tougher. You either can't or shouldn't join the Marines, either because you're too young, or because an intelligent person knows that proving that your manhood should be less time-consuming than a career. You can't go fighting all the bullies in high school, because school authorities aren't very discerning, which makes them very good at persecuting the persecutors of persecutors. If you're under 18 your contracts are legally voidable, which means it's difficult to even start a business.

In other words there aren't too many ways to prove that you can take a beating and keep on going, that you can defend the people around you if things ever get too dangerous, or that you can even devise a serious plan and carry it through to fruition. The question on every healthy young man's mind isn't when he'll finally become a man. The question is how he's going to prove it. And then in the middle of this mess you find a character who listens to and stops for nobody -- a character who bloodies his teeth for absolutely no reason other than expressing his aggression, who lives in a dump for no reason other than an aversion to comfort, and starts a cult for no reason other than to wreck the whole universe. Tyler is a bad man, but at the very least he's a man. The question is why anyone wants to be like someone they wouldn't want to share a house with.

Brad Pitt brings glamorous appeal to a sickly persona: if you want to look like him it's an uphill battle. On the other hand acting like Durden is completely possible whether you're brilliant or stupid, beautiful or a feminist. He appeals to our inner individualists in an age jaded by punks and hippies in uniforms; his every action declares that he'll be thinking for himself, and that nobody and nothing's going to keep him from doing it. Men love defiance in a leader, especially in matters of war. Women love the attitude instinctively, because if this kind of thing goes right, they end up with an entrepreneur and a defender: the guy who brings home the bacon, and keeps other men from taking it. But if it goes wrong? Well, then they end up with Tyler Durden. The man who destroys the bacon he already had, and then goes on to destroy everyone else's.

Mankind has a funny way of admiring men for doing terrible things in
great ways. It might even be our signature mark. Men will admire even enemy
generals and devils in general. We'll
be jealous of Hitler and Stalin for their genius and charisma while
planning how to slit their throats for their vices and villainy. And the unavoidable fact of Hitler's and Stalin's and Durden's impressiveness is that they're all masters of the things that precede virtues and make them possible. You might call independent thinking and fortitude neutral virtues, because they aren't really prudence or charity -- but combine them with prudence and charity and you've got a heck of a man. Combine them with lust and boredom and you have at best a Lord Byron, who waltzes into the ballroom, steals the Prime Minister's wife, leaves her a hot mess, and then goes off to war for Greek independence. At what may arguably be the absolute worst, you have Tyler Durden.

Tyler Durden is to modern Westerners what the nation of Sparta was to our forefathers -- a man every man pretends to admire but nobody really wants to meet. He eats black soup and moldy bread. He never changes a diaper or has a normal relationship with a lover. He lacks all the luxuries and comforts and money to buy them. He spends all day fighting and getting ready to fight. He steals and surrounds himself with thieves. All in all a recipe for misery.

But at the heart of the matter, willpower -- this spirit struggling in defiance against the body -- was never meant to purchase misery. It all seems like a horrible waste of humanity, like all the monks and fakirs and Manichees and Puritans and the men who walk around with heads held high and sour faces; men who demand our admiration for ruining their own happiness. We have some pity for the Puritan. We know that if we find ourselves running for discomfort it's because we're worried we'll end up dependent on pleasure. But we know that if we find ourselves dependent, the solution isn't so much to become stoics and sleep on the floor. We maintain that the secret is a wise but virile moderation, and to know that if we're going to lose all the things that make us comfortable, we won't only be okay -- we'll survive, and we'll be happy surviving because we're free men. A free man has pleasure as a mistress, not as a master.

I think we'll always be jealous of Tyler on some level, but at the bottom of the matter he's a terrible example. So my advice is to find someone who has the same fight in him but turned it in the right direction. Good heroes are the only antidote for impressive villains; if kids fall in love with Durden, it's only because they were never introduced to Ben Franklin, or Cyrus the Great, or King David, or Horatio Hornblower, or Teddy Roosevelt.

I can think of one polar extreme to Tyler Durden, but people pass him up because we teach about him the wrong way. I remember a man once saying (possibly Will Durant, in his Story of Philosophy) that Jesus preached a feminine morality. Nothing could be farther from the truth. If Jesus was too concerned with taking care of us, it's because there is only one reasonable way of looking at a broken and miserable humanity if you claim to be from heaven, and that is with extreme pity. Anyone who ruins dinner parties by speaking uncomfortable but necessary truths, and walks right into a temple and starts beating up banksters, and gets famous but turns down riches and women, and builds a following and purposely loses it, and intentionally walks right into crucifixion for the purpose of saving his friends has to have a kind of defiance to pain and suffering not only uncommon to women, but foreign to the overwhelming majority of manly men. If Jesus is feminine, then the only acceptable conclusion we can ever reach is that we're all effeminate. If people worship Tyler Durden, it's because they never discovered that Jesus was tough as nails.